Introvert's corner
Mar. 31st, 2011 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supergeeIn Hitchhiking through Asperger Syndrome, a memoir of having a son with that condition, Lisa Pyles remarked, "The child who said the emperor has no clothes was probably one of our kids."
I was reminded of that by reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis's account of some men who recently profited by realizing that Wall Street was going through another bubble. One of Lewis's protagonists had been diagnosed with Asperger's, and several others showed lacks of social grace and skill that only their financial success could make tolerable. They also, like many maladjusted types, had a tendency to focus excessively on matters those without such conditions could accept on their face, in this case being able to dig through the tangled webs of CDOs and other postmodern financial instruments to find that they were actually tissues of fantasy built upon deliberately fraudulent loans to people who couldn't repay them if they hit the lottery twice.
I myself do not fit comfortably into the Asperger's box, but I deeply sympathize with those who do and feel that I have much in common with them and with other sufferers from introversion and attention pathologies. We live in our heads and use the clumsy mechanisms of intellect to try to figure out how to live in the world, as opposed to the happy many who appear to live directly in the world. So it is unsurprising that I identify with the protagonist of Jo Walton's Among Others, who shares some of my techniques and interests.
Some do not. One of the unfortunate behaviors the Internet enables is the sort of book review in which the reviewer explains how much better the work in question would have been had he deigned to write it. Such reviews are particularly amusing when one already knows that the book is excellent and the reviewer demonstrates that he could not write his way out of a crocheted prophylactic. Behold a most excellent Horrible Example, by someone who considers Mor, her creator, and thus by extension me monstrous.
I was reminded of that by reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis's account of some men who recently profited by realizing that Wall Street was going through another bubble. One of Lewis's protagonists had been diagnosed with Asperger's, and several others showed lacks of social grace and skill that only their financial success could make tolerable. They also, like many maladjusted types, had a tendency to focus excessively on matters those without such conditions could accept on their face, in this case being able to dig through the tangled webs of CDOs and other postmodern financial instruments to find that they were actually tissues of fantasy built upon deliberately fraudulent loans to people who couldn't repay them if they hit the lottery twice.
I myself do not fit comfortably into the Asperger's box, but I deeply sympathize with those who do and feel that I have much in common with them and with other sufferers from introversion and attention pathologies. We live in our heads and use the clumsy mechanisms of intellect to try to figure out how to live in the world, as opposed to the happy many who appear to live directly in the world. So it is unsurprising that I identify with the protagonist of Jo Walton's Among Others, who shares some of my techniques and interests.
Some do not. One of the unfortunate behaviors the Internet enables is the sort of book review in which the reviewer explains how much better the work in question would have been had he deigned to write it. Such reviews are particularly amusing when one already knows that the book is excellent and the reviewer demonstrates that he could not write his way out of a crocheted prophylactic. Behold a most excellent Horrible Example, by someone who considers Mor, her creator, and thus by extension me monstrous.
